Friday, November 21, 2008

The Economy Must be Bad

At PDX, and I've never seen it this empty. The line to get checked in was literally four long, and the security line was about ten. And this is at seven--presumably the main time for travel. It was so dead that the woman in the security line joked that without my beard, I look nothing like my driver's licence (not true).

I had a Redhook Double Black last night, which I was going to review as I waited for the plane. But it turns out their boarding now ... right on time. So it will be tonight. Mind the fort, will you?

5 comments:

I had the Double Black just two nights ago too. I'm interested to hear what you say about it. I'm guessing they are no longer making it with Starbucks, but I thought it was better than a lot of their other brews. I don't know if it's just me, but the quality of their ESB and IPA have gone way down in the last few years.

I flew to San Francisco last month… granted, it was a Sunday around noon, but there was no line whatsoever… walked right up to the auto-check-in kiosk, waltzed right over to security, passed right through the metal detector with no difficulty, and had close to 2 hours to kill at the Rogue restaurant (the Glen was good, as was their dark rum… the Double Dead Guy smells a smidge like vomit to me, which is nothing compared to their Old Crustacean - which effectively mixes copious amounts of vomit and cherry cough syrup… *gag*). I actually took a significant amount of time getting my stuff organized to pass through the scanners and packing it all back up to put on my person, and never saw another soul even approach the gauntlet… it was dead. I guess I didn't get the memo that we don't need to get there so early anymore (most people didn't show up until ~15 minutes before boarding).

The flight back the following Saturday (also around noon) was a bit more populated… I think it took about 15 minutes to get through security. Still left me plenty of time to kill at the Gordon Biersch… unfortunately I was pretty rhino'd by then so no beer for me, but the garlic fries were spectacularly garlicked.

On my way to Brazil last week I experienced an empty PDX and planes that were not stuffed (haven't seen that in a while). But at PDX the Rogue place seemed to be well patronized (I noticed as I walked by).